A Novel Method for Enforcing Exactly Dirichlet, Neumann and Robin Conditions on Curved Domain Boundaries for Physics Informed Machine Learning

We present a method for enforcing exactly Dirichlet, Neumann, and Robin conditions on general triangular domains with arbitrarily curved boundaries. The algorithmic constructions developed here complements those in a previous work for general quadrilateral domains. Our method combines (i) the exact mapping between a general curved triangular domain and the standard triangle, (ii) TFC constrained expressions, and (iii) Barnhill transfinite interpolations, to provide explicit closed-form trial ansatze that mathematically satisfy the imposed boundary conditions exactly. Corner compatibility induced by the boundary conditions is pivotal, and enforcing exactly the imposed boundary conditions hinges on the exact enforcement of the induced compatibility constraints. The corner compatibility associated with the acute vertices of the standard triangle and the coupling between gradient components when the hypotenuse corresponds to a Neumann/Robin boundary pose particular challenges. Two strategies are critical to resolving these issues, by reformulating conditional corner constraints into equivalent unconditional forms and by introducing a separate TFC-style auxiliary edge construction together with an associated linear solve on the hypotenuse. We analyze the corner compatibility constraints and present formulations for the general form of functions that exactly satisfy the imposed Dirichlet, Neumann, or Robin conditions on curved triangular domains. The proposed method has been implemented using extreme learning machine type randomized neural networks for solving PDE problems. We present ample numerical experiments with linear/nonlinear PDE problems on a variety of domains with complex boundary geometries. Numerical results show that the current method has enforced the Dirichlet, Neumann, and Robin conditions on curved domain boundaries to the machine precision.

Operator learning in scientific machine learning is concerned with approximation of maps between infinite-dimensional function spaces; such maps frequently arise as the solution operators of partial differential equations (PDEs). Neural operators have demonstrated broad empirical success at approximating such maps from data. However, most existing neural operator architectures enforce boundary conditions indirectly through training from data even though the boundary condition is often known exactly. Furthermore, existing modifications and approaches that do enforce boundary conditions explicitly suffer from impractical restrictions, including boundary smoothness, uniform grids, and separable, box-like domains. In this work, we propose an architecture which, independently of training, satisfies homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions, whilst simultaneously retaining the expressivity of existing kernel-integral neural operator architectures. This is achieved by enforcing the property that the output of each layer is contained in the span of a subset of the homogeneous Dirichlet eigenfunctions of the Laplacian on the output domain. The method requires only that the output domain be bounded with Lipschitz boundary and places no restriction on the choice of discretization, making it applicable to arbitrary mesh data and general geometries. We prove universal approximation for the resulting architecture; furthermore the approach we adopt in the analysis proves universality for a broad class of kernel-integral neural operators thereby uniting existing theory for a variety of operator learning methods. We validate the proposed method on maps defined by the coefficient to solution map in 2D PDEs: Darcy flow on a square domain and the Helmholtz equation on a circular domain. Comparisons are made with alternative methods.

Parametric PDEs can admit different boundary conditions with different accuracy and computational cost. We introduce a framework for learning when one reduced boundary condition can replace another: paired solutions train a neural network to estimate the resulting domain and boundary errors, and the simpler condition is used only when both predicted errors meet prescribed tolerances. We focus on singular limits in applications, in which a stiff Robin or nonlinear boundary law is replaced by its limiting Dirichlet form. We evaluate the method on a galvanic corrosion problem and other nonlinear stationary and evolution problems.